HYCU Presents at AI Field Day 7

The Role of Data Protection in AI Readiness

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At AI Field Day 7, Brian Babineau, Chief Customer Officer at HYCU, outlined the company’s direction and how data protection plays a crucial role in AI readiness. He introduced his team and emphasized HYCU’s mission to ensure complete data protection and recoverability, especially as businesses embrace AI technologies and shift workloads to the cloud. Babineau drew on his experience in cybersecurity and MSP environments to underscore the urgency of resilient data strategies in the face of modern threats, including cyberattacks and accidental deletions.

Babineau discussed how AI is transforming IT, especially with integrations into existing business applications and the growing importance of AI-specific architectures like vector databases. HYCU is aligning its R&D and product development strategies to support these emerging data environments. The presentation explained that as data moves into second and third generation public cloud environments, new gaps in data availability and protection are becoming evident. HYCU is focused on addressing these risks to ensure that data feeding AI models is both secure and recoverable, which is fundamental for trust and innovation in AI systems.

To reinforce resilience, Babineau highlighted HYCU’s R-Cloud platform, which offers flexibility in backup and recovery options across multiple environments—on-prem, cloud, multi-cloud, and edge. The emphasis was on giving customers the freedom to protect and recover workloads from any location, preventing vendor lock-in and increasing operational flexibility. Strategic partnerships with companies like Dell and Okta, and support from top-tier investors such as Bain Capital, position HYCU to scale its offerings globally. The ability to manage data across complex infrastructures makes HYCU’s solutions increasingly relevant in an AI-powered enterprise landscape.

Personnel: Brian Babineau

Protecting the Intelligence and Infrastructure Behind AI

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In his presentation at AI Field Day 7, Sathya Sankaran, Head of Cloud Products at HYCU, emphasizes the importance of protecting the data and infrastructure that underpin AI systems. He highlights that while much of the AI conversation tends to focus on GPUs and models, the foundational data that fuels AI often lacks comprehensive protection. During AI implementation, vast and varied datasets are generated, modified, and analyzed—through data lakes, object storage, and lakehouses—posing significant challenges in maintaining consistency, accuracy, and recoverability. Sankaran underscores that much of this data resides in the cloud, making cloud the “home of AI,” but also introduces new threats due to fragmented services, inefficiencies, and blind spots in current protection measures.

HYCU aims to solve these challenges by offering broad and deep coverage across diverse cloud workloads, ensuring consistent and meaningful backup and recovery. Unlike traditional backup solutions that may not cater to AI-specific workflows or protect more than raw data, HYCU’s platform captures the entire ecosystem, including metadata, views, access policies, and AI-specific formats such as enriched JSON and vector databases. This level of comprehensive protection enables traceability and rollback capabilities for AI pipelines, which are critical when dealing with issues like schema drift, corrupted data, or poisoned datasets. HYCU’s approach involves aligning backups with stages like model training checkpoints, and doing so in a way that maintains consistency across fragmented and asynchronous data processes.

Adding to this, HYCU’s partnership with Dell and use of deduplication technologies such as DD Boost make backing up even large-scale AI data cost-effective and cloud-resilient. Their solution minimizes storage use and egress costs by identifying and transferring only changed data segments, often achieving up to 40:1 savings. This also supports cross-cloud backups, offering organizations flexibility and protection from vendor lock-in or catastrophic cloud failures. Ultimately, HYCU positions itself as an essential component in modern AI architecture by centralizing protection, enabling long-term recoverability, and reducing operational risk, all while keeping pace with the rapidly evolving landscape of AI workloads.

Personnel: Sathya Sankaran

Delivering Valuable AI Insights Requires Protecting AI Data Sources

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In the AI Field Day 7 presentation, Subbiah Sundaram, Senior Vice President of Products at HYCU, highlighted the importance of data protection in the context of AI deployment and insights. Sundaram emphasized that protecting data is not limited to the raw data itself, but also includes configurations, metadata, and associated systems that power AI infrastructure. He outlined HYCU’s multi-faceted approach, starting with free data discovery across a broad range of sources, including SaaS, PaaS, DBaaS, and IaaS environments. Their platform helps enterprises continuously map out and visualize their data estates, identifying unprotected resources and automating categorization — a critical need in today’s highly distributed and complex IT landscape.

Sundaram delved deeper into the challenges of protecting data sources that fuel AI models, particularly in environments that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods to augment language models with proprietary data. The protection of vector databases, such as Pinecone and Redis, was noted as a key differentiator for HYCU, positioning it as the first enterprise backup vendor to offer such capabilities. He discussed how data spread across public cloud, SaaS platforms, and on-premises infrastructures can be managed and protected from a single control plane, offering portability, granular recovery, and ransomware resilience. Importantly, HYCU’s architecture is modular and API-driven, allowing customers and partners to rapidly integrate new SaaS sources ahead of the market, while also maintaining compliance and service-level agreements.

Throughout the presentation, Sundaram underscored a growing enterprise awareness of the need to protect operational and AI-related datasets as they move from experimentation into production environments. He revealed key industry data, showing that most organizations have experienced at least one SaaS-related data breach in the past year, with significant financial and operational impacts. HYCU’s approach ensures that customers retain ownership of their backup data, avoiding third-party control or markup of cloud storage services. Their global, scalable architecture supports all major cloud providers and emphasizes intelligent data locality to minimize costs. Overall, the presentation framed HYCU as a forward-thinking, customer-centric player in AI and data protection, uniquely positioned to help enterprises maintain data sovereignty, security, and continuity in accelerating AI adoption.

Personnel: Subbiah Sundaram